In my nerdier days...ok ok....I've never quite shook off that wonderfully geeky tendency of mine.
Truth be told...I love information...but only accurate information.
One would have assumed that with the net and tv and smart phones, that we would be getting bombarded with all manner of top notch quality data at our fingertips.
But it appears that good quality information is at a higher cost now than ever before.
If you want good information from a newspaper, you need to pay for a high priced subscription, which may or may not be available for home delivery.
Why does everyone hate paper so much???
Or is it just a conspiracy to keep good data out of the hands of the every day man or woman like me?
When I try to get good reads from CNN.com or CTV.ca I see lots of photos and click bait.
What am I .....10 years old? I still visit these sites hoping that someday I will be able to read a thoughtful two page essay on the current state of affairs, and again and again I find myself clicking on links to view the latest pop culture crap and yet another trendy way we can lose weight in 30 days without trying.
Nope I'm ready for the real McCoy, the real news....not that I really understood the whole
"fake news" phenomenon.
Perhaps the real difference between "fake news" and "real news" is merely the price that we are willing to pay. The free websites propagate fake news because that is all they can afford to publish. They don't necessarily want to pay fact checkers to verify each story before they run it, because the news blurbs flow at lightening speed. They don't want to publish anything too shocking about the big wigs because they don't want to get sued. So they stick with beige. Beige fake news click bait. Who has time for checking facts and accuracy, when folks just want to "feel" like they are " in the know"? and few can tell the difference between a real honest story and a frilly fluffy piece of nonsense?
I must admit that we as a society are partially to blame. Perhaps we never should have cancelled our old fashioned "throw it at the front door" style of newspaper subscriptions. Maybe we never should have preferred glimpsing briefly at flashy colorful headlines with two paragraph pseudo stories.
We should have preferred the thoughtful "takes a while to learn to understand it" style of journalistic meat instead of the visual cupcake. We should have been willing to pay a higher price for the higher value now put on all things "paper".
The switch to all things digital is leaving a bigger gap between the haves and the have nots. The haves pay for the right to access good data. The rest of humanity...the "have nots" click feverishly to access the free garbage been poured out on the free websites...and we are reaping the
mental starvation from eating this low quality mental fast food.
Maybe they should figure out how to print newspapers on bamboo pulp paper or rice paper....maybe it could become trendy again to disseminate the same data to all of our front doors ....with the same high quality, high level of thinking style journalism. And those who can't digest the real stuff, can just go watch cartoons.
Hmmmm..
Peace,
C.
Tweet
Truth be told...I love information...but only accurate information.
One would have assumed that with the net and tv and smart phones, that we would be getting bombarded with all manner of top notch quality data at our fingertips.
But it appears that good quality information is at a higher cost now than ever before.
If you want good information from a newspaper, you need to pay for a high priced subscription, which may or may not be available for home delivery.
Why does everyone hate paper so much???
Or is it just a conspiracy to keep good data out of the hands of the every day man or woman like me?
When I try to get good reads from CNN.com or CTV.ca I see lots of photos and click bait.
What am I .....10 years old? I still visit these sites hoping that someday I will be able to read a thoughtful two page essay on the current state of affairs, and again and again I find myself clicking on links to view the latest pop culture crap and yet another trendy way we can lose weight in 30 days without trying.
Nope I'm ready for the real McCoy, the real news....not that I really understood the whole
"fake news" phenomenon.
Perhaps the real difference between "fake news" and "real news" is merely the price that we are willing to pay. The free websites propagate fake news because that is all they can afford to publish. They don't necessarily want to pay fact checkers to verify each story before they run it, because the news blurbs flow at lightening speed. They don't want to publish anything too shocking about the big wigs because they don't want to get sued. So they stick with beige. Beige fake news click bait. Who has time for checking facts and accuracy, when folks just want to "feel" like they are " in the know"? and few can tell the difference between a real honest story and a frilly fluffy piece of nonsense?
I must admit that we as a society are partially to blame. Perhaps we never should have cancelled our old fashioned "throw it at the front door" style of newspaper subscriptions. Maybe we never should have preferred glimpsing briefly at flashy colorful headlines with two paragraph pseudo stories.
We should have preferred the thoughtful "takes a while to learn to understand it" style of journalistic meat instead of the visual cupcake. We should have been willing to pay a higher price for the higher value now put on all things "paper".
The switch to all things digital is leaving a bigger gap between the haves and the have nots. The haves pay for the right to access good data. The rest of humanity...the "have nots" click feverishly to access the free garbage been poured out on the free websites...and we are reaping the
mental starvation from eating this low quality mental fast food.
Maybe they should figure out how to print newspapers on bamboo pulp paper or rice paper....maybe it could become trendy again to disseminate the same data to all of our front doors ....with the same high quality, high level of thinking style journalism. And those who can't digest the real stuff, can just go watch cartoons.
Hmmmm..
Peace,
C.
Tweet
